Throne of jade

-
Quick review of the second of Naomi Novik's dragons and Hornblower mashups, "Temeraire: Throne of Jade". Good stuff, better than the first one, but there's still something missing for me.

Maybe it's the characters' constant worrying about manners and etiquette, or the occasional lapse in the dialogue where a British character uses an American phrase ("I must go see him now", instead of the more British "I must go and see him now", or "go to see him"). I'm nitpicking really, it was a good read but I've yet to read a tale of a long sea voyage that wasn't at least as dull as 7 months at sea. This was no exception to that rule, but worth sticking through to a cracking ending and a great set-up for the next book. If you liked the first Temeraire book, you'll enjoy this one.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

(fre)ebooks

-
Tor are currently giving away free ebooks as part of a promotion for their new website. Just sign up for their newsletter and once a week they'll email you a link to download it in html, pdf, or mobi format. They're on their third book at the moment: " The Outstretched Shadow " by Mercedes Lackey and Someone Else Whose Name Isn't As Distinctive. The previous two were " Old Man's War " by that nice Mr. Scalzi, and " Spin " by Robert Wilson. I have a decent-sized screen on my PDA-phone-thing, and reading "Spin" was quite comfortable. There were advantages over the paper version (reading in the dark; not as heavy; easier to read one-handed while swaying on the commuter meat wagon; I always have my phone with me so I've always got a book too), and disadvantages (could not read at the beach; or anywhere in bright light; not as high contrast as print on paper which did give me a slight headache after an hour or so; my book now depe
Read more

Best. Purchase. Ever.

-
About two weeks ago I managed to pop the little rubber cover off one of my Apple in-ear headphones . It pinged off into the middle of the open railway crossings we have here in Australia, during a collision with one of my more indecisive fellow-pedestrians. These little rubber doobries have to fit your lughole snugly otherwise they sound shithouse. I tried using the medium sized ones (the headphones come with three different sizes; my giant canals need the large size), but it was no good. I journeyed far and wide in search of replacement whatsits, but no-one makes them. Not even Apple. In times of crisis I find it helps to turn to a higher power. Google found me an article where someone recommended the use of the foam sleeves for the Shure E2C in-ear headphones . These happen to be a perfect fit for the Apple ones. Great! Only problem is that there are only two places in Australia that distribute them. One charges $35, with free shipping. The other charges $25 , plus $7 shipping. The
Read more

Sharing Files Between Windows Mobile and Mac OS X via Wi-Fi

-
Image
I bought an ibook just before they started bundling bluetooth, but after they started bundling airport extreme. On Friday, my new i-mate jasjam (also called a HTC Hermes / TyTN ) was delivered. It comes with Active Sync, which only works on PCs. It comes with a USB cable, but all I could do with that was charge the battery on a Mac. It has Wi-Fi and joined my home network easily, but it won't sync over wireless. A bit of googling later, and I found out that you can share files, and get it to work as a modem with a mac - but only via bluetooth. Grr - no good for me unless I shell out for a dongle. There's also Missing Sync , an Active Sync replacement for Mac OS X, but it costs money and requires OS 10.4 (I've got 10.3 - so that would be an extra $200 on top). I thought of using FTP to transfer files, but Windows Mobile doesn't come with a FTP client. You can buy them, but I'm a skinflint. Ah-ha, I thought, Windows Mobile probably supports SMB (the windows standard
Read more